The speaker of the House was singing last Friday. A reporter had just prodded John Boehner, a man never shy about showing his emotions, to reveal how he really felt walking away from 24 years in Congress and the highest-ranking Republican post in government, amid the fracturing of his party. He responded with a Disney tune: “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” he warbled, his gaze threatening to dissolve into tears. “Zip-a-dee-ay.”

It was a properly surreal end to his career. During the former plastics executive’s four years as speaker, the same far-right conservatives whose victories had given him his majority then openly plotted against him for having occasionally been willing to make deals with the Obama administration. When news of his resignation reached a convention hall across the capital where conservatives were vetting an equally fractious slate of GOP presidential candidates, the room erupted with a standing ovation. To many, the party’s dissension is dumbfounding, the leaderboard of presidential candidates absurd. But there is one man who would not have been surprised, had he lived to see it, because he was there when the internal forces now threatening to ravage the modern Republican Party first came together: Roger Milliken.

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Milliken’s name does not mean much to most anyone born after the Vietnam War, but he was the godfather to the first generation of modern conservatives. The owner of one of America’s largest private companies, a textile manufacturer he turned into a chemical-processing giant, Milliken used the profits from his staunchly antiunion mills to fund conservatism’s founding institutions, including the National Review and Heritage Foundation. Many of the facts we take for granted in politics today—that the GOP is a conservative party; that it counts on the solid support of white, male, working class voters in the South and West; and that big-money donors can pick and choose its candidates, even to the point of running themselves—were the fruits of his career.

It was weirdly appropriate that Boehner chose to end his farewell press conference with the tune from ASong of the South. It was Milliken who moved to a solidly Democratic Dixie and transformed it into a bastion of Republicanism. Milliken built the South Carolina GOP into a national force, convincing Sen. Strom Thurmond to switch parties and birthing the “Southern Strategy” that put Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan into the White House. It was Milliken who inspired all future conservative candidates by pushing Barry Goldwater to run for president, then bankrolling his landmark campaign. Milliken was also the financial patron of the influential libertarian “Freedom School,” which trained a generation of conservative kingmakers, including Charles Koch. “He was the John the Baptist of the Koch Brothers,” says Marko Maunula, a historian at Clayton State University in Georgia.

It was appropriate, too, that when Boehner prepared to quit, he reportedly turned to Rep. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, to encourage the South Carolina congressman to help take his place in the House leadership. Gowdy represents Milliken’s adopted home district of Spartanburg and helping to elect Gowdy in 2010 was one of the final political acts of Milliken’s life. He died just weeks after Gowdy won the House seat, after donating the maximum to Gowdy’s campaign.

Milliken would have understood intuitively the fight between business conservatives and antigovernment libertarians, and voters’ competing desires for help from the state and their allergy to any policy that gives government largess to anyone they see as undeserving. Milliken would have smiled at the presidential candidacies of conservative Republican senators from Texas, Florida and Kentucky. He’d likely have been disappointed by the early exit of an antiunion Wisconsin governor. But he also would have been first to spot the appeal of a candidate riding a wave of antigovernment brio and white, male, working-class discontent—a fellow protectionist billionaire who, publicly and brashly wins admirers by bragging about his ability to buy off the entire field.

One of Milliken's last political acts, in 2010, was to help launch Rep. Trey Gowdy, a central figure in the current House leadership struggles. Above, Milliken in 2004. | Getty

He would have understood those contradictions, because, like anyone forging a successful movement, Milliken and his fellow founders had to make compromises. Their shaky, often nose-holding alliances on race, foreign policy and the economy, among other issues, turned what had been a disaffected array of diehards into a dominant political power—even as they now threaten to tear the party apart at the seams. If you’ve ever wondered how the GOP can be both the party of Lincoln and defenders of the Confederate flag, a refuge for protectionists and the disaffected working class and protector of the most powerful multinational corporations, a party of Pauls and Bushes, Kochs and Tea Partiers, and, yes, Donald Trump—it helps to take a closer look at a man who helped start it all.

***

Roger Milliken grew up in a Republican Party that would be unrecognizable today: a loose coalition of wealthy businessmen, northeastern liberals, populist moderates and conservatives from the Midwest and West. It was the party of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan, held together, barely, by a shared belief in laissez-faire economics and Calvin Coolidge’s maxim that “the chief business of the American people is business.” As late as the 1960s, many still believed the party’s future lay with a liberal wing advocating for civil rights, demilitarization, Social Security and the strengthening of pro-business labor unions.

The Millikens were part of the wealthy business faction. The family’s textile fortune went back to Roger’s grandfather, Seth Milliken, whose New England general store struck it big selling wool uniforms to the Union Army during the Civil War. By the time Roger came home from Yale in 1937, the company controlled a string of department stores, the Mercantile Bank and a profitable chunk of Manhattan real estate, along with its core textile mills in New England.

Known as “Big Red” for his auburn hair and lanky, six-foot-two frame, Milliken was never drafted into World War II, most likely due to a congenital heart defect. Instead he plunged himself into the family business, climbing its ranks as wartime profits soared. The apprenticeship ended suddenly in 1947, when his father dropped dead in his arms on a Long Island golf course, leaving him in charge of the company. Roger was just 31.

At that moment, the company was at a crossroads. Thanks to the wartime boom, it was richer than ever. But Milliken’s workers, like those across American industry at the time, had also grown powerful, and were demanding an ever-larger share of the profits. In 1946 and 1947, unions had launched a wave of massive unrest, a now all-but-forgotten two years in which 4.6 million workers walked off the job to protest postwar wage and production cuts and consolidate the gains they had made through the Depression-era New Deal and during the war.

Instead of fighting the unions at home, Milliken decided to leave them behind. The one part of the country where unions were still struggling, he knew, was in the South. The Millikens had made their first investments there back in 1884, buying shares in a cloth factory on the Pacolet River, near Spartanburg, South Carolina. During the Depression, Roger’s father, Gerrish, had snapped up full control of mills across the Cotton Belt as owner after owner defaulted on their debts.

There was a good supply of workers in the South, many of them former farmers who’d lost their land to banks as logging, mining and the railroads wound down through Appalachia. More importantly, Milliken knew first-hand how the Congress of Industrial Organization’s postwar labor organizing effort in the South, Operation Dixie, had failed. Southern police had helped managers harass the organizers, but more importantly, the workers had resisted the unions themselves. The mill towns attracted workers by offering a cornucopia of benefits that would make the most ardent defender of modern entitlements blush: subsidized housing, free schools and healthcare, a company-run credit union and fully-funded churches. There was even free equipment for the local segregated baseball teams. Dependence (and loyalty) to the companies ran deep. Textile wages, already among the lowest in manufacturing, remained 40 percent lower in the South.

Milliken began moving more of his business there. In 1954, when South Carolina voted to become a “Right-to-Work” state—adopting a law that allows workers to refuse to pay union dues, making it more difficult for unions to organize—he went all in: moving his headquarters to Spartanburg along with his wife, the former Justine “Nita” Van Rensselaer Hooper, and soon-to-be five children. “It was the same reason the mills moved from England to Massachusetts” in the nineteenth century, Milliken’s friend and fellow South Carolina billionaire George Dean Johnson told me on a visit to Spartanburg in 2013. “Capitalism is like water. It’s going to go where you have the most profits.”

There was an immediate culture shock. “We’d get kidded for being Yankees,” Roger Milliken Jr., now in his sixties, recalls. The family’s political affiliation didn’t help. South Carolina, like the rest of the former Confederacy, was solidly Democratic. South Carolina’s politics had seemed settled since 1877, when white supremacist Democratic paramilitaries led by a former Confederate cavalry officer seized the statehouse from Republicans and ousted federal troops tasked, among other things, with enforcing voting rights for blacks. The resulting political consensus—among the whites that could still vote—was summed up in the slogan of Sen. Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith, son of a plantation slave owner who represented the state from 1909 to 1944: “Cotton is king, and white is supreme.”

Republicans were especially unwelcome at that moment. The landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education had just been handed down, mandating desegregation of schools, with former Republican California Gov. Earl Warren as chief justice. Signs reading “Impeach Warren” dotted South Carolina highways. Politicians railed against the infringement by the court and the Republican Eisenhower administration on their states’ rights to enforce racial segregation. Soon after, Eisenhower ordered federal troops to desegregate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.

But Roger and Nita rapidly ingratiated themselves to the local community with money and charm, donating to area colleges and financing tree-planting campaigns.

Milliken, shown here in 1995, was the godfather of the modern conservative movement. | Getty

The first crisis came a year later, when blouses showed up in U.S. stores from Japan with prices far below what even the low-wage factories on the Carolina piedmont could manage. This was not a surprise to anyone plugged into national politics: since the end of World War II, the U.S. government had spent billions rebuilding industry in Western Europe and Asia, trying to create markets for U.S. goods and build a bulwark against Communism.

But South Carolinians went ballistic. Newspapers there likened the blouse imports to Pearl Harbor. A state law required traitorous stores to post in the window: “Japanese Textiles Sold Here.” Milliken’s lobbyists raced to Washington to demand quotas. Under pressure, Japan reduced its exports.

For Milliken, the blouse scare was a reminder that someone could beat him at his own game, finding labor willing to work for even less than southerners. It hardened his resolve to keep wages low. But some workers took a different lesson: That the industry to which they had been loyal might not be so invincible after all.

Soon word reached the boss that organizers with the Textile Workers Union of America were making inroads at the company’s print cloth plant in Darlington, South Carolina, promising they could get the workers higher wages. The workforce was sharply divided. To make sure the antiunion faction won, Milliken began making the 140-mile drive each way to personally lobby his workers, promising to protect those who opposed unionization and punish those who didn’t.

On September 6, 1956, the vote came in: 256-248 to join the TWUA. Milliken’s board immediately shut down the plant and fired every worker, regardless of how they had voted. The United Press headline read: “Union Wins and Loses at Mill.”

In an era when labor unions were at the height of their power, the shutdown made national news. The town of 6,000 was devastated. Darlington’s mayor, who had backed management, now tried begging other textile manufactures to take over the abandoned factory. None would. Shamed, the mayor turned to the federal government to plead for food assistance. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled that the closing was illegal and forced Milliken to pay restitution. But the boss kept fighting until 1980, when he paid out $5 million; some claimants received as little as $50. By then a quarter of the fired workers were dead. For years, anti-union campaigners in the South handed out bumper stickers that read “Remember Darlington.”

Milliken saw his fight against unions as more than a struggle for profit. “He saw everything in civilizational terms. That what was good for his company was good for American industry in general, and what was good for American industry was good for America,” says the historian Maunula, who has studied Milliken and the South.

But Milliken’s viciousness in Darlington had tarnished his reputation as a protector of his workers, and the Eisenhower administration’s reluctance to stem Japanese garments signaled an uphill battle on trade. If he was going to defeat the unions for good and bolster his industry, Milliken needed a political force.

***

Milliken spotted a ready target in the Republican Party. It didn’t take a smart, billionaire businessman to see that the Republicans were in trouble. By 1959, the party of business was in danger of splintering, its traditional leaders bickering endlessly over direction. The Democrats meanwhile were riding high, their seemingly unbreakable national coalition built around the welfare state their party had created with the New Deal. Many doubted the GOP could win the next year’s presidential election in which it would likely face a well-funded, charismatic Democrat with a big family name: John F. Kennedy.

But there was another vision for the party’s future. Warily eyeing the rise of the liberals under New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a small band of conservatives imagined a different way forward. If they could somehow combine the “heartland” conservatives of the Midwest and West with southern whites, it might be possible to overwhelm the “eastern Republicans” and lead a conservative takeover of the party. They would just need the right leader to pull it off.

To most political observers, this seemed like pure fantasy. “Most people [in South Carolina] were born Democrats and died Democrats, and never much discussed why they were,” Robert F. Chapman, a former Spartanburg federal judge who befriended the Millikens there, told me. We met at his Spartanburg retirement home in 2013, surrounded by pictures of him with Presidents Eisenhower and Ford. One of Milliken’s last gifts to him, a signed copy of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, lay on an end table. “The last thing my grandmother said to me—she was 91, and I remember she died on Christmas Day—she said, ‘Bob? How in the world did you ever become involved with those terrible Republicans?’”

His answer, as it would be for many, was the textile king.

From Milliken’s vantage as a transplant in Spartanburg, he could see something that both national pundits and lifelong southerners couldn’t: Southern Democrats weren’t as unified as they seemed. Southern politics were typified by what the political scientist V.O. Key Jr. has called “one-party factionalism,” where differences were fought out within the party, papered over by a consensus on a racial and economic status quo. The New Deal was crafted in large part to appeal to the Jim Crow South, as Columbia’s Ira Katznelson has written: Social Security, unemployment insurance and minimum wage laws excluded the vast majority of African Americans, especially in the South, by excluding farmworkers and domestics. While building the fragile coalition, Franklin Roosevelt had refused to intervene in southern filibusters to kill legislation that would have made lynching a federal crime.

But Southern Democrats had since become suspicious of national Democrats’ backing for black civil rights. South Carolina’s leading Democrat, former governor-turned senator Strom Thurmond, briefly broke with the national party to run for president in 1948 on the ticket of the staunchly segregationist, antiunion States Rights Democratic Party, known better by its nickname, the “Dixiecrats.” The tensions between these competing interests—white supremacy, economics, and the changing face of the national Democratic party—had created fissures the right strategy could exploit.

Milliken was not a segregationist. In fact, he actively fought for integration, at least in Spartanburg, paving the way for integration at Wofford College by pledging to replace any alumni donations lost after the first black student enrolled.

But his fortune was built on a rigidly segregated industry. The worst textile mill jobs were reserved for black men, who opened bales of cotton in dust-filled rooms at risk for explosion. White women and children worked the looms. The best jobs were reserved for white men, as weavers, card-pickers, contractors and supervisors. The most senior white managers in Pacolet were given houses on the hill, where they could keep watch over town. Fiercely protective of that system, the white workers were instrumental in the refusal to participate in nationally integrated unions—the very quality that made South Carolina so attractive to the textile magnate.

And Milliken was more than willing to tolerate segregationists in politics as well. He began early on by courting Thurmond and his key aide, Harry Dent, to enlist them in his fight against unions and for high protectionist tariffs on textiles. Nor would he do anything to discourage segregationists from joining him as he began to build up the state’s tiny Republican Party, patiently courting conservative Democrats to join the cause. These erstwhile New Dealers, who had celebrated federal assistance when it helped poor southern whites, were becoming increasingly disenchanted as they saw federal power instead being used against segregation and to help immigrants and blacks. That was good enough for Roger.

***

South Carolina was becoming the hotbed of the new conservative Republican movement—and not just because of Milliken. During the fight over unionization at Darlington, when he was making his 140-mile journeys to lobby the workers, the textile boss would sleep on a nearby estate in Camden, home to the Texas-born oil speculator and conservative operative William F. Buckley Sr. The oilman’s sons—James, a future senator, and the writer William F. Buckley Jr.—were fast becoming national stars. Like Milliken, the Buckleys were Yale men who bridged the northeastern business elite with the populist, conservative South. Soon after Bill Jr. founded the National Review in 1955, Milliken became its leading sponsor, buying thousands of gift subscriptions and back-page ads for his new product lines.

The ads made Milliken a ready target for those seeking money for the nation’s new right wing. And Milliken usually said yes. “There weren’t a lot of conservative organizations in the country and there weren’t a lot of self-identified conservative donors,” John Von Kannon explained to me when we spoke, a founder of the American Spectator magazine and now a vice president at the Heritage Foundation. Milliken also gave to the far-right John Birch Society, whose founder alleged President Eisenhower was a Soviet agent. He later became the patron of Robert LeFevre, who called for withdrawal from the United Nations and claimed to have seen Jesus atop California’s Mount Shasta. When LeFevre’s “Freedom School,” the influential libertarian seminar, had to leave Colorado, Milliken brought him to Spartanburg to teach at Milliken & Company.

The South Carolina conservatives’ most important contribution of all came in 1959, when they found their unlikely leader. Milliken had been paying close attention to the years-long strike against the Kohler Company, a plumbing supply manufacturer based in Wisconsin. An attempt by laborers there to join the United Auto Workers had descended into violence between strikebreakers and unionists. In 1956, the same year as the Darlington strike, Herbert Kohler announced he was building a plant in Spartanburg to take advantage of the antiunion laws. (He also became a major advertiser in the National Review.) A U.S. Senate committee was investigating corruption and abuse in the labor movement at the time, and a year later a junior senator, with the strong backing from businessmen across the country, managed to bring the powerful head of the UAW, Walter Reuther, to testify in front of the committee about the Kohler strike. That senator was Barry Goldwater, a telegenic jet pilot from Arizona.

Milliken was a key player in Barry Goldwater's ascent to the top of the GOP ticket in 1964. Above, Goldwater (right) and his running mate William Miller at the 1964 Republican convention. | Getty

Milliken was impressed. He had to see if the Arizonan would go over as well with South Carolina conservatives as he did with national antiunionists. So in 1959, he arranged for Goldwater to address the nascent South Carolina GOP. He also took the then-novel step of paying for the speech to be broadcast across the state. Goldwater peppered his stock antiunion and anti-Communist message with some red meat for the southern crowd: blasting the Supreme Court and its decision in Brown v. Board of Education as “not based on law.” It was a triumph. To celebrate, Milliken took the senator and his friend Chapman for a round of golf at a North Carolina country club, then lent Goldwater his private plane to return to Washington.

Like Milliken, Goldwater was not a segregationist. He had fought for integration in Arizona’s National Guard and schools and even joined a local chapter of the NAACP. But also like his sponsor, he was shrewd. Goldwater and Milliken both knew that the support of southern conservatives would be essential to the creation of a national conservative movement. Buckley had gone all the way: when the National Review asked itself in a 1957 editorial whether southern whites were entitled to “take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically,” it answered: “Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Goldwater and Milliken didn’t need to go that far. However they felt about racial apartheid, they adamantly opposed any federal effort to end it.

That parsing was enough, for Goldwater, Milliken and the southern segregationists alike. It set the stage for Goldwater’s coming success, and laid the groundwork for a contradiction that has haunted the conservative movement ever since.

The following January in 1960, Goldwater published a conservative manifesto, ghostwritten by the Buckleys’ brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell. Soon after he returned to the Palmetto state to address the largest-ever Republican state convention there, repeating his objections to Brown and this time throwing in praise for Thurmond, who was increasingly becoming alienated from the rest of the Democratic Party. When Goldwater finished, Milliken rushed the stage to nominate him for the presidency. As the Associated Press reported, “His motion was greeted with rebel yells of agreement and a parade of county delegations behind Confederate and U.S. flags.” The banner of the Dixiecrats, symbol of solidarity with the putsch and pogroms of 1877, had at last been raised for a Republican.

The South Carolinians knew there was little chance Goldwater could win the nomination at that summer’s convention in Chicago. In fact, Goldwater, unwilling to anger the party bosses pulling for Nixon, only ultimately agreed to go forward with the plan if he could use his speech to pull his name from consideration. (Then-South Carolina state GOP chairman Greg Shorey later told a conservative newspaper that Goldwater got cold feet at the convention, and that Shorey and Milliken had to lock him in a bathroom until he agreed to go on stage. This is hard to confirm.) But the point was, Milliken and the South Carolinians were playing a long game: They wanted to present Goldwater to a national audience. By nominating him, they guaranteed that Goldwater would be given a chance to speak on national television.

Goldwater took the stage at an unexpectedly divided convention. Conservatives were furious that Nixon, the likely nominee, had made a deal with Rockefeller and the liberals to put a civil rights plank in the convention platform—a move backed by 5,000 demonstrators led personally outside the convention hall by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. An NBC reporter at the convention quoted Goldwater as saying that “Nixon’s position on full Negro rights is going to cost him Southern support and the election,” as the camera found a Confederate flag waving among the delegates. Goldwater later called the Nixon-Rockefeller meeting “an American Munich.”

His speech was everything that Milliken had hoped for: a clarion call for Republican unity under a conservative banner. “Let’s grow up conservatives!” Goldwater trumpeted in what became the speech’s signature line. “If we want to take this party back—and I think we can someday—let’s get to work.”

Four years later, Goldwater won the nomination outright. Milliken provided the key financial backing, and South Carolina conservatives, including Thurmond, went out on the campaign trail. The result was a Democratic rout, but one with a crucial silver lining. Goldwater won his home state of Arizona and four others: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and, indeed, South Carolina.

Those Pyrrhic victories, all but guaranteed when Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act that summer, broke the Democratic hold on Dixie forever. In the wake of the election, Thurmond officially joined the Republican Party. He brought with him his advisor, Harry Dent, who would go on to architect Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the realization of Milliken’s tacit compromise with the segregationist states. (Milliken also tried to entice George Wallace to switch parties—but as Rick Perlstein wrote in Before the Storm, by that point the Alabama governor felt that Thurmond had already stolen his thunder.)

In this 1975 photo, William F. Buckley (far right) and his brother, U.S. Senator James Buckley (far left), chat with future president Ronald Reagan and Senator Barry Goldwater at the 20th anniversary celebration of the National Review. | AP Photos

In 1976, when Ronald Reagan mounted his first conservative challenge for the presidency, his aides approached Buckley, Thurmond, and Milliken to bolster his name at the convention, according to Buckley’s memoirs. In 1980, following a crucial primary win in (where else?) South Carolina, Reagan stopped at Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair, near the site of the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, to announce, “I believe in states’ rights.” That fall he thumped the Democratic incumbent in every southern state except Jimmy Carter’s native Georgia en route to a national landslide.

Seven months after taking office, Reagan declared illegal a federal air traffic controller’s strike, decertifying the union and forcing the firing of 11,000 workers. American unions have not recovered since.

Milliken’s company was now a leader in the industry. The unions were all but finished. Republicans dominated his adopted South, and with it the nation’s politics. It must have seemed like he had won.

***

As the Reagan conservatives were busy remaking Washington in 1981, many Americans felt they had just gotten over an unusually rough decade. Two recessions and rising oil prices had cut deeply into profits. A surge in imports, fomented by overseas investment and trade liberalization dating to the Eisenhower administration, was crushing manufacturing with a ferocity that made the 1956 Japanese “dollar blouse” crisis look quaint. Every week, another American textile mill closed.

But the downturn wasn’t temporary. After World War II, a third of U.S. workers had been employed in an industrial sector that produced sixty percent of the world’s manufactured goods. By Milliken’s death in 2010, industry’s share of the U.S. workforce would drop to one in ten. The U.S. trade deficit in goods today stands at more than $740 billion.

In his latter years, Milliken focused his energy on protectionism. He poured money into an initiative to promote American-made clothes featuring ads with O.J. Simpson and Wonder Woman’s Lynda Carter. At an event in Spartanburg, the reigning Miss America, future Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, descended in a mock hot air balloon onto a revolving stage, where she praised American textiles before exiting on Milliken’s arm.

But U.S. consumers with stagnating wages didn’t care. They wanted cheaper clothes. So Milliken went after the supply, sending his lobbyists to Washington to fight for limits on textile imports. In 1985, Thurmond and his South Carolina Democratic colleague, Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, introduced a bill to put strict quotas on South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The bill passed Congress.

Milliken had bet wrong. Like White Houses before them, the Reagan administration had adopted the Washington consensus, bolstered by corporations and Wall Street banks that had benefited from globalization, that prosperity lay with borderless commerce. At odds with this new GOP establishment, Milliken turned to the last ally he could have imagined: unions. Forced together to save the shuttering factories, the workers and bosses lobbied together for Reagan to sign the bill. But the effort was in vain. On December 17, 1986, the president vetoed the textile protection act.

The irony couldn’t have been bitterer. Republicans could now reject the once dominant textile industry’s demands and still carry the South. As the industrial historian Timothy Minchin has written, thanks to the work of Goldwater, Thurmond and Milliken “most white southerners could not conceive of voting for the Democrats.”

Like the union at Darlington, Milliken had won and lost his political war.

The trade deals “broke his heart,” Milliken’s friend and longtime lobbyist Jock Nash later told the Greenville News. Subsequent administrations removed the last formal protections on textiles. Milliken’s strategy of outrunning the unions, a strategy he thought would boost American industry, instead became a model for competitors who flocked overseas to places like Bangladesh, Guatemala, Vietnam and Haiti, where they can get even cheaper nonunion labor. Even Walmart, once a Milliken manufacturing ally, changed sides: now 70 percent of the store’s merchandise comes from China.

To save his company, and his bottom line, Milliken turned to cutting costs. Technology was making it possible to do more with fewer workers: Between 1948 and 1994, production in textiles increased by 190 percent, while the number of people employed in the industry dropped by half. In 1983, ninety-nine years after the Millikens bought their first shares in Pacolet, the mill closed down. Overall, since the height of its employment, the company has slashed its workforce by more than 80 percent.

Remorseful about the loss of jobs in Upstate South Carolina, Milliken eventually turned to foreign companies, helping convince BMW to open its first North American plant in Spartanburg, promoting its non-union workforce as an inducement. But he still believed that a return to protectionism was possible. Milliken began supporting challengers to the free-trading Republican politicians he had done so much to put in power. He cut off donations to the Heritage Foundation and NationalReview, and railed against China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. In the early 1990s, he helped convinced Pat Buchanan—who had written Reagan’s signing statement vetoing the textile protection act—to run for president as a trade protectionist. Milliken backed Ross Perot in the 1990s and even reportedly tried to back anti-globalization activists on the left.

But it was too late. The manufacturing sector he once championed—the one that employed so many Americans—was gone, dispersed across dozens of countries as global trade and economics made it easier to move goods around the world and allow manufacturers to capitalize on cheaper labor.

Milliken died on December 30, 2010, but his legacy surrounds today’s presidential race, as the conservative movement he helped create has remade national politics. The South is now as solidly Republican as it once was Democratic. Legal segregation ended; as William Buckley Jr. admitted to Time in 2004, “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.” But race remains a political wedge. More than half of all white voters supported Republicans in 2014, compared with 15 percent of blacks and 42 percent of Hispanics, according to the 2014 American Values Survey from the Public Religion Research Institute. Tea Party voters (60 percent) were more than twice as likely than Democrats (27 percent) to agree that “over the past couple decades the government has paid too much attention to the problems of black Americans and other minorities.”

New laws, bolstered by a conservative Supreme Court, now allow moneymen to dump nearly unlimited amounts of money into campaigns. Labor is defeated: barely one in ten Americans are members of a union now. Corporate profits have grown more under the Obama administration than any since World War II. Today, Milliken & Co. collects billions on patents, for everything from on-demand printed carpets to the chemical that makes Crayola markers washable to lightweight blades for wind turbines—some of which it makes in its new factory in Shanghai. The family company’s former New York headquarters at 1045 Sixth Avenue has been razed for a new building. Dubbed 7 Bryant Park, it was recently purchased for $600 million by Bank of China. (The land under it will stay in the family, though.) In an awkward tribute to the South Carolina town where its southern expansion began, the property-managing firm is called Pacolet Milliken Enterprises. And Milliken’s own family is shifting as the world does too: In 2012, Roger Milliken, Jr., and his wife donated $212,000 to the Democrats and Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, inside the GOP, the coalition Milliken helped build is shrinking, as the proportion of non-Hispanic white voters declines with each election—but it’s not gone yet. Many Republicans argue that they must hold onto that powerful demographic to win, even if that is probably doomed as a long-term strategy. Candidates who take the populist route must appeal to the conflicted base, which today means pledging to protect and restore their lost jobs, to somehow defeat the Asian and Latin American manufacturers who do them more cheaply, and to round up immigrants while promising to keep the “government programs that help the right people.” Buckley’s heirs are apoplectic: no candidate who emphasizes such things “can call itself conservative,” wrote a senior editor of the National Review.

But in the former mill towns of upstate South Carolina, those arguments sound distant and academic. Young people have left. The once-flourishing private welfare towns are barely a memory. Pacolet’s dilapidated cloth hall, once the center of the Milliken empire, stands empty. In the hardest-hit counties of the state, one in ten people is unemployed. Anger and frustration are running high. As of late September, the candidate dominating the field in South Carolina, with 34 percent of the vote, is Donald Trump.